The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (19 page)

1
The current U.S. commute is 24.5 minutes each way (usgovinfo.about.com/cd/censusandstatistics/a/commutetimes.htm). However, a PTM is likely to have a longer-than-average commute.

2
“Americans Using TV and Internet Together 35% More Than A Year Ago,” Nielsen Wire (blog), March 22, 2010 (blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/three-screen-report-q409/). And also: Adam Singer, “The Ultimate Lifehack: Gain Back 13.9% Or More Time,” The Future Buzz (blog), February 3, 2011 (thefuturebuzz.com/2011/02/03/tv-viewing-trend/).

3
Adam Singer, “Going Car-Free,” The Future Buzz (blog), December 1, 2010 (thefuturebuzz.com/2010/12/01/going-car-free/); Adam Singer, “Reflections On 6 Months Without A Car,” The Future Buzz (blog), May 23, 2011 (thefuturebuzz.com/2011/05/23/going-car-free-follow-up/).

4
For a delightful example of how it works from the boss’s perspective, see: Chris Ashworth, “My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists,” ChrisAshworth.org (blog), June 24, 2010 (chrisashworth.org/blog/2010/06/24/my-competitive-advantage-i-hire-artists/).

I
t’s best if you move from PTM to GTM as part of an organized process, and with clearly defined goals. And so, after six chapters of “philosophy,” we at last come to the time-management process itself, which consists of these five steps:

1. Budget your time based on the goals you have for each investment category (a.k.a., your “mission”).
1

2. Schedule your week based on the budget.

3. Follow the schedule and track your time-use.

4. Tally your time use at the end of the week and compare with your budget. If necessary, revise the budget and schedule. Then repeat steps 3 and 4 the next week.

5. Watch yourself get more productive!

The first step,
budgeting
, is by far the hardest, because it’s the one where you need to make tough choices. Regarding the 60% of seminarians who did not stop and help during the Good Samaritan study, Darley and Batson note:

Why were the seminarians hurrying? Because the experimenter, whom the subject was helping, was depending on him to get to a particular place quickly. In other words, he was in conflict between stopping to help the victim and continuing on his way to help the experimenter. And this is often true of people in a hurry; they hurry because somebody depends on their being somewhere. Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.

Budgeting is basically a way of resolving as many of the conflicts, and making as many of the difficult decisions, ahead of time, which is a far better strategy than making them on the fly. It consists of three easy-seeming steps which, in the end, turn out to be far from easy: (1) listing your investments, (2) allocating weekly time to each, and (3) making adjustments so that you stay within your 112-hour-a-week total.

(1)
Make a list of all your investments
, including health and fitness, personal growth and development, education, planning and management, relationships, community work, creativity, replenishing recreation, and serious vocations. (It’s okay to exclude a category that doesn’t pertain to you, of course.)

(2)
Next, break each investment down into its “sub-investments.”
If you are planning an ambitious writing career, for instance, you’ll need to invest time not just in writing, but editing, marketing, sales, and business management (Section 8.7).

In Health and Fitness, your subs might include exercise, meditation, and appointments related to health and wellness.

In Relationships, your subs might include your spouse, each kid, your parents, other family members, and friends.

Once you’ve listed the sub-investments, you might have to drill down some more, to sub-subs. Under the “writing/marketing” sub, for instance, you might list blog updates, producing and mailing your e-newsletter, social media, and phone calls with mentors and other professional colleagues (Sections 3.10 and 3.11).

(3)
Next, allocate the
ideal
amount of time you’d want to invest on each investment (or sub or sub-sub) each week.
Ideally, you want to allocate time relative to the activity’s importance to you, or its prominence in your mission.

When doing this work, I recommend ignoring investments or subs that occur infrequently or irregularly, because it gets too complicated to create a budget (and schedule; see Section 4.10) around them. During the weeks you have such a commitment, simply re-budget and reschedule everything to accommodate them, and then revert back to your “default” weekly budget and schedule the following week.

When you finish, you’ll wind up with something like the chart on the next page. (Download a free budget template at www.hillaryrettig.com.)

Most people’s “ideal” budget winds up at 150-200 hours per week—which clearly ain’t gonna work. You’ve got 112 hours a week to work with, or maybe 119, if you can get by on seven hours of sleep a night. (Again, no cheating—going without needed sleep is antiproductive.) Which brings us to Step 4:

(4)
Cut back to 112 hours.
This is the hardest step in the entire time-management process because you will probably have to cut things important to you or others.

The easiest way to cut back is to eliminate entire investments—for now.
If you’re finishing a thesis or book, maybe now is not the time for you to be doing any community work. Or, if you’re struggling with a serious personal or family problem, maybe now is not the time to finish your book.

Eliminating an entire investment not only frees up a lot of time but creates enormous relief—and relief is an excellent barometer of your true needs. Of course, if you’re perfectionistically over-identifying with your writing or other work, you’ll have trouble giving it up even temporarily. See the section on sabbaticals in Section 6.5.

Once you eliminate entire investments, see if you can prune some subs. Maybe you can’t or won’t quit your community work—fine, can you eliminate one committee? Or, if you don’t want to stop working on your thesis, can you simplify it? (Something you should do anyway; see Section 2.15.) Are there projects or committees you can be excused from in your day job? Or friends or relatives whose company is less than gratifying, and whom you really wouldn’t mind seeing less often—or not at all? (Section 3.8.)

Next, start pruning your time expenses to recoup valuable fractions of an hour. If it typically takes you two hours to get to your office in the morning after waking up, see if you can pare that down (
without
rushing around or omitting important tasks) by fifteen or thirty minutes. If a fifteen-minute yield seems trivial, recall Principle #1, and how people who value time properly prize small amounts of it. Fifteen minutes a day yields you an hour and forty-five minutes a week—or 91 hours a year! And you can probably make the cut relatively painlessly by doing one or more of the following: simplifying your breakfasts, not checking your email, turning off the TV (try radio instead!), letting the kids get themselves ready for school and/or make their own lunches, delegating companion animal care, or leaving for work earlier or later to shorten your commute.

Work to trim
all
time expenses as much as possible, without resorting to rushing around or adding stress. You can probably reclaim another five hours a week.

Here are some tips to assist you with your budgeting:

1)
Budget in fifteen-minute (1/4 hour) increments
, as per the above example.

2)
Expect to move from relatively easy decisions to really hard ones
—in fact, some of the hardest you’ll make in your life. You’ll probably wind up giving up activities that you enjoy, or that others value, or that make you feel important or special, or that are entrenched habits or vehicles for procrastination. You’ll almost certainly be moving outside your comfort zone, and perhaps letting go of a grandiose attachment to being a super-worker or prodigious helper (see Sections 4.8 and 4.9). Make no mistake: these changes are all positive. But they can be hard to get through. Be extremely kind and patient with yourself throughout the budgeting process, and give yourself abundant Rewards (Section 2.11). Also, seek out abundant support.

3)
As per Principle #4, if you’re not sure whether to include an investment or sub you should probably jettison it.
If you’re questioning whether something is truly important, it probably isn’t—and, often, when we can’t decide, it’s because we’re self-censoring. Also, if you’re only including a goal because you’re “supposed to” (i.e., it’s conventional) or someone is pressuring you to include it, get rid of it.

4)
Build in plenty of self-care, recreation, and planning and management time.
Also, allot generous travel and preparation time between activities. The time-budget must always be a realistic reflection of your human needs and constraints.

5)
Show your time budget to your mentors and get their feedback.
This is very important, as your mentors are your “reality check.” Ask them whether they think you are allocating your time in a way that will help you achieve your goals.

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I’m not a fan of mission statements because they tend to be vague and abstract. I’m also not a fan of the “track your current time use” advice some other time-management experts give, since in my view it simply ties you to old habits. Let’s look to the future!

I
f you’re having trouble reaching 112 hours—or if you’ve reached it, but aren’t sure which activities in each investment category to focus on—there is a time-management technique so powerful that it’s a kind of magic: specialization.

Perfectionists, of course, decry it: they think everyone should be able to do everything—and extremely well! Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein provided a famous example in his novel
Time Enough for Love
:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Like most grandiose perfectionist harangues, it is not just dead wrong, but silly. And, anyway, he put those words in the mouth of a character who lives thousands of years and therefore has a luxury of time none of us has.

In fact, it’s incredibly important that you do specialize—or, more specifically,
aim to spend as much of your time as possible doing your high-value activities
: those that are, as noted in Section 4.4, mission-focused, that leverage your strengths, and that create impact ot change. Doing this will:

• Get a great result;

• Build your expertise/mastery;

• Increase your effectiveness;

• Boost your productivity;

• Create fulfillment and joy (because we usually enjoy the things we’re good at, and vice versa);

• Help others build
their
expertise, effectiveness, productivity, and joy (because you’ll delegate your low-value activities to those for whom they are high-value);

• Build powerful communities through the delegation process; and

• Transform you into someone who leads and inspires others.

If you don’t focus on your high-value activities, you’ll not only lose all of those terrific benefits, but also get stressed, exhausted, and resentful. Writers who try to build their own website or fix their own computers (Section 3.6), for instance, typically spend way too long at these tasks, find them frustrating, and get a subpar result.

Of course, all this applies to your personal life, too. When you take Mom out for a fun meal or accompany her to a medical appointment, you’re leveraging your strengths—your filial devotion and caring, and, if you’re helping her choose a treatment, your analytical skills, and it’s doubtful whether anyone except perhaps another sibling could make as meaningful a contribution. When you run her errands or mow her lawn, however, you’re not only not leveraging your strengths but doing something others could do equally well or even better, and thus wasting your time.

You should specialize even in the area of replenishing recreation, to optimize the amount of recreation per hour invested. If you love to garden, but not the backbreaking work of tilling the soil, delegate that part of the project to someone else. If you love to rehabilitate antique wooden furniture, but not the messy, tedious, chemical-y part where you strip the old paint and finishes off, delegate that. Ah, the joys of a pre-tilled garden bed or clean wood surface to start with! (More on delegation in Section 4.11.)